Darker Than Amber

p. 79

Travis McGee (the story’s main character) has an old friend named McGee and Maya know an old friend named Jake Karlo. He’s a sort of con man, but a reasonably honest one. “He is about the size of a full grown cricket. His standard gait is a jog trot. When I first knew him, he had a tiny office in a ratty old building in one of the oldest parts of downtown Miami. He booked third-class talent into fourth-class saloons–beefy strippers, loud young unfunny comedians and loud old unfunny comedians, off-key sopranos for weddings, and off-key baritones for funerals, musicians who would take years to make it and musicians who had made it too long ago, butterfingered jugglers, trained dogs and shabby chorus lines. But he could make you feel each act was the greatest.”